New Metallica album will be finished this summer

The new Metallica album will be finished “this summer”, according to drummer Lars Ulrich, though it might not be released in 2016.

The veteran metallers were keen to hedge their bets on when the album would eventually be available to the public in a recent interview.

“If the record doesn’t come out this year, then it won’t be because it’s not done,” Ulrich told Metal Forces. “It will be because there’s some sort of cosmic reason that it would be smarter to hold onto it until next year. But the record will be done this summer.”

Twitter/Lars Ulrich

June seems to be the crunch time for fans of the band, because that’s when they’ll meet to decide on the logistics for an album which they’ve been recording since at least November, Ulrich revealed.

He said: “We’re now coming towards the end of the musical creative process and we’re starting to look ahead and the process of how we’re gonna share this record with the universe. The month of June is basically when we’re gonna sit down and figure what we’re gonna do with it all; what we’re gonna call it and what’s gonna be on it.

“Greg Fidelman is 24/7 on this record and has been since last summer. He’s doing an insanely great job and has been putting his heart and soul in it pretty much every waking moment of his life in helping us engineer and produce this record.”